He pressed the play button, but the little girl remained frozen on the grass at the edge of a playground. She tilted her head to one side, not yet committed to going or staying. The homeless child must have known that she belonged here with kids her own age. Perhaps she recognized a normalcy that had been ripped away from her. So here she was – looking to fill a need.
Doing the best you can.
Kathy came to play.
Charles Butler leaned toward the screen, spellbound by the beautiful little girl, a miniature Mallory. All around her the world was aswirl with action and sound, small feet running in packs and tiny screams of outrage and joy.
The solitary child hesitated another moment. Then, light stepping, cautious as a cat, she padded toward a row of swings, gray boards dangling from long metal chains. She took her seat among the rest, looking right and left with grave suspicion, and she began to swing in a small tentative arc. Now Kathy leaned far back to steepen the pitch and made a soft giggling sound at the wonder of flight. On the upswing, she soared above a line of cruel spikes atop an iron fence. An illusion of the camera made these spears seem close enough to impale her.
Fearing nothing from the hard ground below, she leaned farther back to make the swing fly higher. Reckless and grinning, she soared up and over the heads of wild-eyed women, mothers and nannies, their waving hands and their screams of Come down!
Riker turned to Charles. The man’s mouth was working in a silent prayer, Don’t fall.
Toes pointed toward the sun, she rushed up to the sky, laughing – laughing.
All the joy died when Kathy looked into the camera lens. Her eyes were suddenly adult and cold. Her hands let go of the chains, and she took flight; literally airborne, she flew out of the camera frame, and the screen went black.
Though Riker had watched this film a hundred times, his hand tensed around the bourbon glass. For him, the child was still flying and always would be – a tossed coin that could never land.
Charles slept soundly on his office couch, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Only Mallory was awake to watch the sun come up. She had returned to the offices of Butler and Company with a stack of morning newspapers, and now she sat in an armchair, sipping coffee and hunting for a police press release. It had not made any of the front pages. The scarecrow’s crimes were old and stale, last week’s news.
The dog days of August marked the close of tourist-hunting season in Central Park, the scene of another daylight stabbing, but today’s headline victim was a man decapitated by a flying manhole cover described as the blown cork of a broken water main. The next runner-up was a woman killed by a stone gargoyle that had fallen from a crumbling building facade on Broadway. All the signs of a town out of control were here in black and white, decay and corruption from the sewers to the skyline.
And then there was Riker.
Yesterday, his sallow skin had been stippled with the small wounds of a shaving razor. His hands always trembled the morning after a binge. Booze poisoning was running its course and killing him slowly. With most cops on the decline, integrity was the first thing to go. Riker had clung to his long after everything else had been lost. He had always commanded great respect, even while crawling out of a bar on his hands and knees.
Why would he risk his job to rob Sparrow’s crime scene?
It was a common form of larceny for cops and firemen, stealing cash and baubles from the dead. But she had believed that all the manhole covers would blow up and the town would fall down before Riker would steal anything. And she still believed that, for now she suspected him of a worse crime – holding out on his partner, secreting evidence and working it on the side.
Mallory turned another page in search of the official press release, a warning to every blond actress in New York City. She found the story at the bottom of page three. Lieutenant Coffey had come through on his promise to give the next victim a sporting chance, but the scarecrow had also warned his prey; he had all but pushed the women into the arms of the police. Why?
She blamed her lack of sleep for seeking logic in a madman’s plan.
The young actress had grown up wearing the discards of the Abandoned Stellas, twice- and thrice-handed-down clothes bought from secondhand stores. Only the fabulous blue suit had never been worn by anyone else, and now it was ruined New York style, with blood, and she had lost her armor. Every passerby could see the genes of a third-generation bastard, the highway debris of traveling men.
This morning, Stella Small stood in front of an uptown cash machine and stared at her bank card. She never balanced her checkbook, for that sucked the last bit of charm out of life, and it also frightened her. She could roughly guess her account balance, enough for underwear, but she was hoping for more. A brochure was clutched in her other hand, and she paused to pray over it, God bless junk mail. Designer suits were featured on the second page of sale items. The fashion outlet store was only one block away, and she had an hour to spare before the next open audition. Stella had gambled a subway token on her belief in synchronicity, and now she fed her bank card into the magic slot.
Her eyes were scrunched shut. Please, please, please.
Stella’s white blouse and skirt had been washed and ironed twice, yet she could detect the smell of a thrift shop in the material.
It was the odor of failure. Her head was bowed and her shoulders slumped in a loser’s posture. But that was about to change.
When she had finished her ritual prayer words over the cash machine, it disgorged all the manna she needed to replace the ruined audition suit. Her first thought was that this was her rent money, that the Abandoned Stellas had made an early deposit to her checking account. Her second thought was that there was a god of cash machines, and he loved theater folk.
She ran to the end of the block and joined a herd of shoppers gathered outside the department store, all awaiting the early-bird sale. Stella had her battle plan ready. The doors opened, and the chase was on. She sped past older women in support hose, descended the stairs to the basement level, then charged toward the back wall where the suits were hanging. If the clothes fit, if the producer liked what he saw – her entire life would change. Her future might be literally hanging on the rack before her eyes, and she was rushing toward it.
And then she stopped.
Damn – another New York moment.
A lumpy woman with brown hair and gray roots pulled the only blue suit from the group of size eights. Stella watched, dumbfounded, as the middle-aged shopper popped a button trying to close the blazer over her bulging stomach. Oh, and now the evil bitch had left a smudge of makeup on one sleeve.
Stella was distracted by the sight of her own face in a mirror on the nearby wall. Without intending to, she had slipped under the skin of the aging brunette, imitating the scowl, the narrowed mean little eyes and the absence of a soul.
The older woman gave up the attempt to shoehorn her body into the suit jacket, and she stormed away with heavy footfalls. Stella retrieved the fallen button and collected her prize from the floor where it had been dropped, but not, Thank you, God, trodden upon. She checked the label. It belonged to a designer she had actually heard of. The price had been slashed in half, another divine act, or, as the Abandoned Stellas would say, Jesus saves.
She glanced at her watch. It was late, but she would make the audition if she hurried, if the line at the cashier was not too long, if the trains were not late. She was still chaining her conditions of success when she ran into the fitting room, where she stripped, tried on the suit and pronounced it a perfect fit.
Stella slung her old skirt over one arm as she walked toward the cashier’s counter. Miraculously, there was no one in line. This afforded her the luxury of a few minutes of preening before a three-sided looking glass, admiring herself from every angle. The makeup stain was invisible as long as she kept her right hand by her side. And there was more than enough time to sew on a button during the subway ride. For a whole year, she had carried a small traveler’s sewing kit in every purse she owned, just waiting for a day like today, when her life might hang upon a button.